Tag Archives: SURBL

SMS Phishers Pivot to Points, Taxes, Fake Retailers

December 4, 2025
38 Comments

China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Experts say these same phishing groups also are now using SMS lures that promise unclaimed tax refunds and mobile rewards points.

GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work

September 5, 2025
68 Comments

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging messages from the GOP fundraising platform WinRed and sending them to the spam folder. But according to experts who track daily spam volumes worldwide, WinRed’s messages are getting blocked more because its methods of blasting email are increasingly way more spammy than that of ActBlue, the fundraising platform for Democrats.

Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud

May 23, 2024
26 Comments

Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

ISP Privacy Proposal Draws Fire

April 7, 2010
34 Comments

A proposal to let Internet service providers conceal the contact information for their business customers is drawing fire from a number of experts in the security community, who say the change will make it harder to mitigate the threat from botnets and malicious software.